Step 1: Strategy

Set clear objectives

Step 1: Strategy
Set clear objectives

At the start of your project, you — and your business stakeholders — are bound to have lots of questions.

What can new technology do for us? How much will it cost? When will it start adding value?

But the big question is this: how can you be sure you’re investing in the right collaboration tools for your organisation?

The big pictureOne size does not fit all. To build your perfect collaboration environment, you need to match it to your own situation. This means taking account of:

People: Your users, their activities and process workflows, and the experiences you need to deliver for them, as well as your people strategy, including changes to your workplace policies and your talent pool.

Business: Your business strategy, drivers and plans — including new sites and acquisitions, changing compliance landscape and a benchmark of what your competitors and partners are doing.

Finances: The financial situation, including budget constraints, TCO of your collaboration environment, and the ROI of any changes.

Technology: The wider IT infrastructure, including what collaboration technologies you have in use today, what options are available to you, and your strategic IT preferences (for instance, cloud versus on-premises technologies).

You, your teams, your peers and your board may have very different views on these topics — so it’s important to set a baseline, doing a detailed assessment with interviews and workshops to explore and document the situation.Focus and prioritiseDon’t get overwhelmed. We recommend identifying a number of use cases drawn from specific lines of business and role types, where new collaboration tools can make the biggest difference. By describing those use cases, you’ll be able to more accurately estimate:

Increases in productivity for particular processes

Savings in costs such as business travel or desk space

Impact on factors such as staff recruitment and retention.

With this you can build a prioritised business case for investment, setting a scoped total project cost against measurable benefits to justify ROI.

Plan your roadmapYou know where you want to go; now you need to define a realistic implementation roadmap that suits your business. This will help you estimate the skill and resources you’ll need for migration and implementation. You’ll find a phased approach, prioritising individual use cases or sites, can help produce quick wins and justify the project to your stakeholders — giving you confidence to move forward.Let Cisco Collaboration Services help you build an environment that improves how users collaborate. We deliver innovation and expertise to help you get the most from your resources and accelerate a more intuitive way to work. Our experts can help you choose, deploy and manage the right solution.

With the Collaboration Strategy and Roadmap service, we can help you set your project up for success, defining and scoping solutions that fit your specific situation. And we can help build a watertight business case for investment. Our experts have helped organisations of every size, in every industry — take advantage of our experience to accelerate your project.

"The magic is there"Watch the video to discover why BBVA, one of the world's largest banks, trusts Cisco's experts to transform the way its people work and collaborate.